


you can't even expect to remain sane

by YesVirginia



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Science Fiction, biotech
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-16
Updated: 2012-10-16
Packaged: 2017-11-16 11:34:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YesVirginia/pseuds/YesVirginia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The universe is a blur and you are cutting through it like a razor.<br/>Plot twist: Once you get past the evil overlady for a boss, being the Helmsman is kind of amazing. (Promptfic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can't even expect to remain sane

 

Every time she stands before you, above you, on a raised dais, with the spill of her hair frothing down over the edge of the platform and her inch-long claws clicking on the reinforced gold of her trident, you scream at her. Your breathing has been dragged out slow, hyperextended along with your life, so the most you manage is a howl when you gather the air for it. Oxygen is not quite necessary any more, the bristle of intravenous tubes growing from your neck and arms and back takes care of that, but you need the breath for screaming. Mostly, it's slow ragged breathless screeches that stop before they even start, and then you stare at her, resentfully, lungs inflating and deflating in the span of minutes. Her smile, flat seadweller teeth blecked with arrogance and contempt, is just that much more yanking at your leash.  
She likes to watch you, stand on the platform in the engine room whenever you're preparing for a jump. There is no rush of speed for her, not that you know, inside the cabins and corridors and vast halls the floors stay level and artificial gravity intact, it's only that she likes to watch you do the actual work.  
  
For you, it's different. Your will is planet-shifting force, infinite ability restricted into a finite number of allowed procedures, every course mapped, every stretch of every travel calculated without your interference, carrying death from system to system, depositing the calling card of incoming calamity on worlds you would have never dreamed. This much, she tells you. We will visit a people, she says, her long tongue inching out of her mouth, and you bare all your teeth, hiss at the display of what seems too much like fondness. We will bring them our message, she says. Submit, or be made to submit. The hard or the easy way.  
  
And you know that you carry death, you know, and though you care, and resent, it does nothing to cancel out the _thrill_ that shudders through every nerve and every extending wire, into each corner of the vastness of the ship that has become a part of yourself, connections running deep, your mind reaching out towards the stars. It starts somewhere in your hindbrain, you think, in your original body, the wetware core of the network of information and power that you have ascended to, that you have been dragged to ascending to. When the scores of safeguards have run their course, all past you in a tide of light and every one of them checked and approved with a lightnining thought, after the signal broadcasts to every corner of the ship and the warning is blared, when you accelerate, it takes your slow breath away, still, every time.  
The first time you felt it, the vastness and speed, space unfurling, streaming past, fast and faster, was tinged with grief, pain, fear, and a corner of you still holds those emotions tight with an iron grip but the rest of you has succumbed, has thrown itself into technological apotheosis for the chance of this feeling, to let your nerve endings crawl along the reaches of the city-sized ship and link your brain to every server it possesses.  
  
Now your thoughts are as numerous as the stars, all arranged in stacks and tiers, and now you feel every drive, every shield, each door and defense plate shifting, moving into their places at the speed of your mind, and your mind is faster than it ever was, as fast as the outer shell of your body that races the light and leaves the stars behind.  
There is one single sharp moment that is a sense of compression, a tension so great it would make the bones of this structure that has become a shell, an extension of your body, creak, were they not titanic, reinforced, unbreakable. Everything is pressed together in that single moment, so much that you feel the strain of the impending jump like a physical sensation of being crushed together tight, coal into diamond into a black hole, and though it edges so close to pain your breathing speeds up from unnaturally slow to merely that of a person deeply asleep – panting, for your standards – the sense of exertion that floods your body and mind, hardware, software, wetware and all as every drive fires up in concert, falls close to perfection. Everything tenses, a tremor of anticipation that only lasts the skin of a second.  
  
Your body, core of untold tons of steel and rarer metals, bound to what flesh has not been replaced with tubing, is soaked in the hormones your glands are flooding out, the endless strain of gathering and gathering additional psychic energy to the constant flow that already keeps everything around you running is throwing every organic component you possess into an ecstasy of stress. You feel the immense weight, impending speed, for a few more milliseconds that drag on and on like minutes, holding everything together with the sheer strength of your will, and then your brain, lynchpin of a network of servers even as you are bound to serve her whim and cruelty, gives the command to accelerate.  
  
The sensation of everything being pressed together trades places abruptly with everything being stretched out, pulled apart, fast beyond all notions of sanity, racing, racing the light.  
  
You win.  
When the power, enough to move a world on its axis and bursting out of your every cell, unloads from its lightning-storm state of being charged and overfull and waiting, you don't cross the distance instantaneously, it's enough time to feel the thrill thud in your blood, speeding the slowed heart up to a dull tick, pouring out light and fire inside your brain and letting it run up, up, up, through your extended fingertips that twitch and tremble in your bonds through the wires twined under nails and around bones, up and up into the ship, into you. And because apart from being the vessel's core of power, fed and nursed and drawn upon in a nerve-trembling torture of replenishing and release, apart from your status as its driving force, you are also its Helmsman, its steersman, with a mere brush of thought you pull the mass of the ship into a wide, world-spanning arc, and give it that one more little push – teeth grinding, eyes flaring and strobing with colours, adrenaline pounding your heartrate up to something close to what your resting pulse was when you still were a person.  
Every cell in your body vibrates in a bliss of speed, firing the white-hot madness along the wires and feeding it into the drives as well, with a feeling of power that only moving fast enough to push through space and traverse a single great leap of it in an instant can produce. Two shuddering pulses rock you to your core, passing in and out of something deeper and colder than space in instants, feeling sharp and blinding bright and burning.  
  
The steel floors vibrate, very briefly. Your body of flesh and bone and tendons and madly firing neurons shakes and jolts in paroxysms.  
Speed. The universe is a blur and you are cutting through it like a razor. You are nothing but energy and information, you are light, something sharper and faster than light.

 

It's over all too soon. You ache, now, if metal can ache, and your original brain throbs, but the wash of endorphins that floods you better than any drug makes the pain melt, vaporize, nothing but the lighter thrill of sailing the ship at its usual speed coupled with the aftershock of a jump that has you scrambled and crackling-glowing every time.  
  
She is bearing down on you again. The focus you needed, the places that the exertion took you to, had the mercy to blind you to her face, her eyes watching yours, but as you reassert yourself, feeling the floors hum distantly, faintly, feeling every power outlet, every fixture like nerve endings laid open on your skin, your eyes slow their strobing and you see her, and she has her fingers curled around the railing that rises between you, so tightly her knuckles stand out. She draws in a deep hissing breath that makes you want to spit at her feet. Wonderful, she says. You are extraordinary, my Helmsman.  
  
You scream at her, defiance, for every planet taken and bled dry, for every _person_ on each planet that was taken, guilt and hate and black desperation, but inside you are faint with the aftershocks, the bone-deep satisfied glow that comes after an effort such as this. You would beg her to go farther, faster, like you have heard some of the ships do, you would cooperate. Without the casing of metal around you, your body would break, trying to race the light from a constellation before it arrived on a planet. You would freeze, burn out, starve, you would die without her hand, you would have never known.  
But she is the one who has narrowed the infinity between the stars down to the paths that _she_ likes you to take, who has given you power but cut and reined it, and so it is the flight that you love, and it is her that you curse.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a quote from Cordwainer Smith's "The Lady who sailed The Soul", to my knowledge one of the first science fiction stories to introduce the concept of space travel helmsmen.


End file.
